Wireless networks are becoming increasingly popular. It is often desirable to provide for accurate playback of multiple audio and visual channels in a networked environment. In particular, wireless speakers systems are also becoming increasingly popular, and often multiple audio playback streams are required. For example, Dolby 5.1 assumes a five loudspeaker arrangement surrounding a user. In the playback of multi-channel audio and visual information over a wireless loudspeaker arrangement, it is important to ensure synchronization of the multiple channels. Failure to accurately synchronize multi-channel audio playback will result in the production of unwanted artifacts.
Thus it is known that clocks of multimedia devices need to be synchronized, e.g., with the accuracy of a few microseconds. This is required by systems playing audio simultaneously from several locations.
One topology of a wireless media network includes a first device having a master clock, and one or more other devices having slave clocks. In such a topology, there is no interaction between slaves. Therefore, the master clock is used independently to synchronize each slave device clock. Therefore, in the description herein, only the synchronization of a single slave device to the master is described.
A clock, e.g., the master clock might be affected by a low-frequency phase drift, e.g., a so-called wander that might be due to changes in temperature in the crystal used for the master clock. One embodiment includes a phase locked loop in each slave device configured to follow the phase of the master's clock.
What is needed, e.g., to comply with the relative time error requirement of only a few microseconds of error, is a method and apparatus of measuring the time error or signal phase error with an accuracy of several microseconds. The NTP protocol (RFC 1305 and 2030) uses a method of measurement that includes applying a timestamp when an NTP packet is sent and recording the time of packet's arrival. The round-trip delay is measured by applying this timestamp inclusion and packet arrival time recording method in both directions, e.g., from a master to a slave device and back to the master device. The absolute time error value is estimated. The inventors and others have found that it is very difficult to achieve a good precision of time error measurement using an NTP-used method in a wireless network. A typical wireless network has a large and variable latency, not necessarily symmetric. Such a latency depends on the traffic intensity and behaves significantly worse than a switched wired Ethernet network.
The inventors have found that even quite sophisticated methods of assessing the quality of time error measurements and elimination of bad samples does not lead to an acceptable solution if the oscillators used in the system are not very stable.
One embodiment also uses an externally source derived clock, e.g., the clock from a CD player or a DVD player, e.g., a mass-production DVD player's crystal oscillator. Synchronization requires following changes in a master clock's frequency, e.g., caused by thermal drift, and the inventors have found that the drift can have time constants in the order of tens of seconds or minutes rather than hours. A slow PLL having a phase error transfer function with a low cut-off frequency is not a suitable solution.
One embodiment of the present invention provides a maximum time error value, e.g., an absolute time difference between the master clock and the slave clock of 20 microseconds.
A number of synchronized wireless media playback systems have been proposed.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,466,832 to Zuqert et al. entitled “High quality wireless audio speakers” disclose a first wireless loudspeaker arrangement using compressed audio with packet transmission. Multiple redundant packets are sent. The arrangement of Zuqert et al. does not disclose how to provide accurate time synchronization between output speakers.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,832,024 to Schotz et al entitled “Digital wireless loudspeaker system” also discloses a compressed wireless transmission system and uses phased locked looping to maintain time synchronization.
United States Patent Application Publication No. US 2004/0252400 discloses multiple media streams using a master node type arrangement.
Whilst wireless audio media distribution systems are well known, the accurate synchronization of output devices remains a problem.